Futurecade games launched by the Science Museum

Should we send robots into war instead of humans? Is genetic engineering OK if it’s used to create life-saving drugs? Would you prefer scientists to try to ‘fix’ the climate so we don’t have to change our lifestyles? And who should pay to clear up space junk before it takes out vital communication satellites?

These excellently knotty scientific problems are captured in Futurecade, a set of new online games created by the Talk Science team at the Science Museum with award-winning studio Preloaded. You can capture clouds and brighten them to reflect sunlight back into space; you can defend a port against attack using robotic lobsters, and you can engineer e-coli while trying not to create scary mutants – all against the clock and with great sound effects.

I’ve been working with the Talk Science team for a while on background briefing notes for these and other discussion activities. The challenge is always to provide enough information for an authentic classroom debate, without over-simplifying or overloading. We’ve developed a template that ensures the main issue is defined, the terms explained and the opposing arguments covered, with key facts and sources also included.

Each of the Futurecade games deals with a genuine issue in technology or science – topics on which there are no easy answers. You know you’ve got the issue right, and explained the angles adequately, when you start to question what you think yourself.

Graham Wakefield, Director of exhibition constructors Beck Interiors Ltd, collects the award

1001 Inventions was crowned Best Touring Exhibition of the year at the annual Museums and Heritage Excellence Awards on 11th May, beating off strong competition from the British Library’s fascinating Evolving English exhibition, as well as entries from Imperial War Museum North and National Museums Liverpool.

I developed the content and wrote the text for the exhibition, which is now on its US tour and about to open in Los Angeles.

The judges said: “This outstanding entry was engaging, well executed and presented a heady mixture of the wonder and magic of science.  The judges felt that its impressive international journey would clearly benefit, educate and excite many people around the world.”

Professor Salim Al-Hassani, Chairman of 1001 Inventions, commented: “Our whole team is humbled by this recognition… Hundreds of people were involved in bringing this project to fruition and they all deserve our thanks. Our sponsors ALJ Community Initiatives, the academic network that put together the content, the writers who made the exhibition accessible to a broad audience, the exhibition designers and Beck Interiors who built the modules to an extraordinarily high standard all played their part in reaching this milestone.”

What is the secret behind the way we write numbers? When did scientists first discover how we see? Who drew the oldest surviving map showing America? 1001 Inventions: discover the Muslim heritage in our world tackles fascinating questions, using imagery, interactivity and models to bring to life a period of history little known to many.

The exhibition has just completed its run in New York, after its launch at the Science Museum and successful tour in Istanbul.

1001 Inventions exhibition

My role was as author of Powering up: are computer games changing our lives?

I’ve just got back from a two-day OU conference – ReLIVE11 – Researching Learning in Virtual Environments, where I was part of a panel Q&A with the great-haired Bill Thompson of the BBC, Focus etc, and metaverse evangelist (and ITV technowizard) Ian Hughes. We had a lot of fun discussing why there’s still opposition to virtual worlds, how they may change, what they’re currently best and worst at, how virtual museum archives might be a good trend, and whether social worlds actually make us less sociable.  Chair Paul Hollins kept us in line and our conversation probably flowed better because nobody interrupted us with Twitter questions as the Wifi was down. (Sorry.) Bill’s point that ‘if you’re not programming, you’re probably being programmed’ chimed perfectly with the similarly knowing quote I’ve heard since; namely that ‘if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product being sold’. I think the whole session is available on the OU site, although I can’t find it at the moment.

Our session was midway through an action-packed programme, with many highlights.

Keynote speaker Robin Wight, the ad-man responsible for 118118, talked about how agencies such as The Engine Group create virtual worlds in our head – simply with a well-chosen image, model or piece of music. If marketing moves into virtual worlds – as Audi is starting to do, along with kids’ brands like Moshi Monsters – will this be the ultimate form of immersive advertising?

Margaret Derrington shared her experience using a free Second-Life-like world, Open Sim, to teach English as a second language. Her idea of making people practice their skills as they worked together to build houses sounded very cunning – and a lot more realistic (peversely) than the scenarios you’re usually given to play out in real-life language classes. Margaret also said she’d been asked by a group of Saudi women to set up a private world where they could learn English without fear of a man overhearing them.

Her description of gaining the skills to build a world in which to teach language included the memorable phrase ‘I can make vehicles, but I can’t make ladies’ breasts bounce up and down. Not that I have any need to do that.’

Simone Wesner presented her findings from the real-life world of arts management, in which MA students need to run a real project to complete their studies – but can’t get the funds to do so. By running their projects in Second Life, they still gain the skills they need – and according to Simone, find it no less rewarding and just as much of a learning experience. Some students still set up galleries or concerts in a facsimile of RL – but others explored the additional dimensions of a virtual world to organise entirely new artistic experiences (in one case, like going around with an enormous cuddly rabbit stuck to her).

Bernard Horan shared an EU citizenship project, in which he is using virtual worlds to help governments understand how to develop effective public policy and understand public opinion. My favourite phrase from his presentation was: ‘They fall through a Galactic Wormhole and then stand on the Debating Carpet’ – and his ideas, played out in a virtual world, had a great resonance with the TalkScience project at the Science Museum which promotes contemporary science debate in the classroom.

Two presentations looked at how students behave in virtual worlds – the outcome, it would seem, depending very much on ‘what they thought they were there to do’. In the first case, two groups given very different tasks were unable to find common ground in their conversation, ending up constantly at odds. In the second case, a group of computer science students brilliantly worked together to solve programming problems presented as obstacles within a game (i.e. questing). I wondered how differently the second case would have turned out if the lecturer had presented the task as competitive, rather than collaborative. The presenter of this second example, Brian Burton, pointed out that 600 school districts in his area of the US are investing in tablet computers for their students – virtual learning application developers take note.

Andreas Schmeil shared his experiences of organising a fully virtual conference – and how, second time round, he plans to lay it out less like a real conference arena, allow Twitter ‘chat’ throughout all presentations, and have powerpoint slides flying off into the sky. Spacey.

Derek Jones, an architect and lecturer in the OU’s Design Thinking module, kept the airborne theme with his opening question of ‘why do we have gravity in virtual worlds?’ His beautiful presentation proposed that there is no difference between the conception of real and virtual realities – and so, just as we feel more creative in a real high-ceilinged room, we can set our minds free by designing new kinds of virtual spaces. In the real world, he suggested, we have stopped designing ‘for conception’.

Mike Hobbs pointed out that Virtual Worlds are currently in ‘the pit of despond’ and ‘the trough of disillusionment’ according to the fantastic Gartner Hype Cycle graph. According to several speakers, various issues dog the use of virtual worlds in education – cost, privacy and the problem that students take so long preening their avatar seem to be big factors.

Indeed, the way we see ourselves in virtual worlds is the topic of the academic volume freshly published at the conference: Reinventing Ourselves: Contemporary Concepts of Identity in Virtual Worlds, has fascinating contributions and is edited by Anna Peachey, who chaired the conference and directs the company that manages The Open University’s own presence in virtual worlds. How does appearance affect authority? What happens if a student chooses to look like a giraffe? If you tell students in virtual worlds that they are brilliant, do they become brilliant? Do virtual worlds increase a sense of ‘flow’ in learning, or does the technology get in the way of flow? This reminded me of research I included in my book’s chapter on whether computer games can affect our identity, with projects that looked at how avatar height (Nick Yee), and clothing colour (Jorge Pena), can change your behaviour (and the response of others).

As we came towards the end of the event, Paul Hollins and Mark Childs led a hilarious, and fortunately high-energy ‘Delphi Horizon Scanning’ event in which small groups of delegates came up with issues that will affect learning in virtual environments in the next 6 months, 3-5 years and 5-10 years. As a member of the group that ‘gamified’ the whole experience, we were delighted to win this particular meeting with more of our ideas voted into the final selection than any other group (don’t think the other groups noticed, so a hollow victory).

Andy Piper’s well-illustrated keynote to finish the event looked at the question ‘where next?’ for technology, with plenty of past predictions (hoverboards being one that hasn’t come true; Star Trek iPad things one that has) as well as – bravely, I thought – his own ’5 in 5′ forecast of things that will change how we work and play in the next few years. You can keep in touch with whether it all comes true here.

For me, the whole conference was great – not just because it was well-organised, full of interesting people and had copious breaks for tea and scones – but because it was in the sweet spot where I knew enough to join in, but not enough that I could predict what anyone was going to say next. I didn’t know, for example, what a prim was before, or a Raspberry Pi, but I do now. And I may not quite know what Derek meant when he said he was an ‘embodied phenomenologist’ but it sounded interesting and that is sometimes enough.

Find my book here, and my blog here.

The virtual conference location in Second Life

The Fifth Element's flying taxis

Was The Fifth Element really 15 years ago? But that means I must be at least humphty-humph years old – and yet we still have no flying taxis to ride around in. Bah.

This never-closing gap between our transport aspirations and reality was quite clear at the launch of Sense and the City last week at the London Transport Museum. Apparently 60 years ago we thought everyone would have their own private helicopter by now. Instead, we struggle around London on often incompatible networks of underground trains and buses, or aboard bicycles that are somehow meant to share lanes with taxis and motorbikes. Planners contend with retro-fitting a system to a city laid out long ago – leading to madnesses like the cycle path-to-nowhere which has been the subject of discussion on a local forum in Chiswick recently (pic below).

So what’s the answer? According to the exhibition, we’re in a new age now – where the availability of information is going to change everything. Soon, everyone will have an iPhone or an iPad through which to access the data we need to make the system work. Or for those without, a rather more democratic system of smart, interactive signage has been proposed by one of the Royal College of Art students who have contributed to the show.

And certainly the truckloads of transport data can be turned into the most incredible visualisations – the number of planes taking off, the number of buses running from dawn to dusk, the number of cyclists being scraped off motorcyclists’ front wheels (not that one, maybe). Tweeting, networking, geotagging, crowdsourcing, the whole show celebrates the idea that we have each now become a datapoint that will assist other datapoints in knowing where to go and how to get there.

Barclay bikes being docked, by Adrian Short

In the way that only a sci-fi fan would, I hope that this is an accurate reflection of how things are going to develop. I hope we will have greener, cleaner choices, made possible by new ideas and a new kind of data-democracy that helps everyone. The reality, as so often, may be different – especially as those in charge seek to pay for new developments. At the finale of Sense and the City is a new-fangled Bus Stop of the Future by Clear Channel, which showed an advertisement for a forthcoming blockbuster – but not, as my companion said ‘when my bus is actually going to come’.

Sense and the City, London Transport Museum, until 18 March 2012

Mosaic of the exhibition opening by Greg Mileham

Read more musings on technology on my Powering Up blog.

User heaven, techno hell?

Last night at the Dana Centre in London I facilitated an event debating whether pervasive computing is going to lead us towards user heaven, or techno hell. If computers are embedded into everything from our phones (now) to our furniture, clothes and even bodies (coming soon), what will this mean for our lives?

As an outsider, I had loads of tantalising questions of my own – although (ahem) was naturally full of determination to let the evening’s audience have their say too. What about techno haves and have-nots? Will we end up with more citizen empowerment or more government control? Can we have the beauty of something like Google Street View, for example, without companies gathering screeds of additional data that they conveniently forget to delete?

The room filled up nicely with an audience busily chatting and/or using their laptops, iPhones, Blackberries and so on. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been in a room with so many geeks all using technology at once’ tweeted a participant. And so we were off.

In conversation with Dr Jeremy Pitt

Dr Jeremy Pitt set the scene, giving a flavour of current happenings in intelligent, adaptive technologies. He is a computer scientist in the Intelligent Systems and Networks Group, Imperial College London, and in conversation we raised issues about privacy, responsibility, the question of who is driving progress at the moment, and what we have to learn or fear from countries who deal with personal freedom differently to us.

Jeremy is working on a book called This Pervasive Day, a collection of viewpoints on the possibilities and pitfalls of pervasive computing, inspired conceptually by a 1970 science fiction novel by Ira Levin, This Perfect Day. The novel sees a future controlled by Unicomp, a global system that dishes out soothing drugs, chooses everyone’s careers, tracks everyone by means of a personalised wristband, and polishes people off by the age of 62 or so, for the general good. A nightmarish vision for many – but, as Jeremy told me, his mother could always see the positive side of the system, too. After all, there was no crime and no poverty, no earthquakes, and it only rained at night.

Dr Alois Ferscha talked from his perspective at the Institute for Pervasive Computing, Johannes Kepler University. As sensors and processors have miniaturised and become essentially invisible, the opportunities for pervasive computing have multiplied. His team, for example, has been working on glasses with a subtle web display, a belt that tells you which way to run in the event of fire, shoes that save you electricity by intelligently turning things on only when you’re nearby, and a chair that knows whether or not a seated student is really paying attention. While all these gadgets would look at home on the Fetish pages of Wired, Alois was quick to recognise that, with convenience and personalisation often seem to come a loss of privacy and a surrendering of personal control.

Dr Oli Mival, a member of the Institute for Informatics and Digital Innovation at Edinburgh Napier University (organisers of the event) underlined this sense of unease when he showed a map logging the recent locations of his wife’s iPhone, data that she had unwittingly shared with him during routine syncing to their laptop. OK, so if we’ve nothing to hide, maybe we don’t mind our loved ones being able to track us – but what does it say about us if they choose to do so? Or if we then choose to hide the information?

Dr Oli Mival (left) and Dr Alois Ferscha join the debate.

Oli illustrated his own people-centred approach to pervasive computing by showing a future meeting room they’ve created at Napier. Tech-stuffed it certainly is, with its multi-touch table that can cope with 80 simultaneous touch-commands, plus interactivity on every other surface too. But the idea is not to get away from pencil-and-paper, which people inevitably end up using anyway. It’s to make technologies that are as intuitive as possible – not which require hours of training and shelves of user manuals.

User heaven or techno hell? Oli created a new category of ‘user purgatory’, which seemed to capture the mood. Pre-recorded films gave us the opportunity to consider some of the best and worst potential outcomes of pervasive computing, from a Big Brother scenario to the shopper’s dream of being able to buy the exact dress you want in the perfect size. We then voted on the impact of pervasive data-gathering and personalisation and the room split almost 50:50 on whether new technologies were beneficial or scary.

The evening’s questions and discussion focused on choice, privacy, whether controlling data about yourself is a basic human right, whether embedded technology should be forced to request permission to track or keep your data, whether legislation can have any impact on controlling data, and how to engage more people in the debate.

But there did seem to be a sense among some in the audience that just because we can do something, doesn’t mean we should – or at least that we as consumers or technologists need to influence exactly what technologies are developed. The idea that ‘technology is neutral and it’s just what you do with it’ didn’t wash. Similarly, some people seemed to want to know how we can make sure the technologies are used to solve important world problems, not just whether I can get shoes in my size. Who will take responsibility for making sure industry, universities, and society at large actually think about the implications of what’s developing? Events like this are only the start.

For more technology and games blogging, visit Powering Up.

A recent TextWorkshop at the Museum of London Docklands

It’s proving to be a busy year at TextWorkshop. Along with upcoming courses at the National Maritime Museum (26th May) and the Design Museum (12th September), we’ve just launched a brand-new Digital TextWorkshop, taking place at the Natural History Museum on 16th June.

It’s never been more important to get your digital text-writing up to scratch, so the new Digital TextWorkshop will cover all the tips and tricks of effective digital communication. We’ll cover writing for screen-based interactives and websites – as well as how and why you should tweet.

The course runs from 10.30-4.30 and costs between £75 and £165 depending on whether you’re freelance or working for a national organisation. You can book a place by visiting www.textworkshop.co.uk, where, along with dates for our 2011 courses, you’ll find pictures and feedback from recent courses and our all-new TextWorkshop video, shot at the Natural History Museum.

I run TextWorkshop with Dea Birkett, director of Kids in Museums, true member of the twitterati, and journalist with The Guardian newspaper. We offer training in good writing for people in the heritage sector, and our unique courses bring together expertise from the worlds of museums and journalism to give people new skills and new ideas.

Our courses are interactive and fun, and we are always looking for ways to make them better. Feedback is very positive – one recent workshop, at the Museum of London Docklands on 3 February, had this response:

‘Great day, very inspiring, I feel energised to write better text.’

‘I learned that writing great text isn’t a secret art.’

‘I feel like I have the tools and techniques to make a difference from boring text.’

‘Brilliant course. You had my full attention all the way through.’

Our next TextWorkshop course is 26th May at the National Maritime Museum, before the Digital TextWorkshop on 16th June. In the mean time we’re doing some in-house work with museums and organisations around the country who want to make sure their text-writing practice and strategy is in tip-top form.

Our latest course at the Museum of London Docklands

In anticipation of another busy year with TextWorkshop, we’ve just launched our new website. Along with dates for our 2011 courses, it also shows pictures and feedback from recent courses and our all-new TextWorkshop video, shot at the Natural History Museum.

I run TextWorkshop with Dea Birkett, director of Kids in Museums and journalist with The Guardian newspaper. We offer training in good writing for people in the heritage sector, and our unique courses bring together expertise from the worlds of museums and journalism to give people new skills and new ideas.

As well as our open workshops, we’ve trained in-house groups from National Museums Liverpool, the Science Museum, York Museums Trust, Imperial War Museum, and many others. Our courses are interactive and fun, and we are always looking for ways to make them better. Feedback is very positive – our most recent open workshop, at the Museum of London Docklands on 3 February, had this response:

‘Great day, very inspiring, I feel energised to write better text.’

‘I learned that writing great text isn’t a secret art.’

‘I feel like I have the tools and techniques to make a difference from boring text.’

‘Brilliant course. You had my full attention all the way through.’

Our next TextWorkshop course is 26th May at the National Maritime Museum. We’re also working in-house with the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, and developing a new Digital TextWorkshop.

Projections on the floor and an atmospheric ceiling

A new gallery Atmosphere – exploring climate science opened last week in the Science Museum’s Wellcome Wing. I ran a TextWorkshop for the team at the start of the project, focusing on how to write good text for interactives and touch-screen exhibits, and later on contributed some last-minute picture research, about which the content strategy manager said:

“Many thanks for all your fast and good work on the project – very much appreciated.”

The gallery is full of impressive digital screen-based and projected interactives, with some wide-format videos that I loved and wanted to take home. Displayed throughout are the ice cores and read-outs that illustrate the practical evidence of climate science.

I talked to a fellow invitee, who said that her grandfather had been a climate scientist. He had spent weeks at a time living in remote, icy camps, and any of the bearded, behatted scientists in the photographs could be him.

To understand climate science, there’s now an easier way than visiting the arctic wastes. All the models and scenarios, not to mention the evidence itself, is on show in this gallery.

An in-depth look at climate science

Engaging teenagers at the Science Museum

I developed and led a text-writing workshop for teenagers in March, as part of a Science Museum-run project to engage young people in the new Who Am I? gallery.

The whole experience was inspiring – it was a project that felt genuine and experimental, perhaps both to participants and leaders. So, with the help of the project champions Micol Molinari and Raphael Chanay, I wrote a case study for GEM (Group for Education in Museums) of which I’m a member,  and it’s just come out.

GEM Case Studies are intended to be frank and so the write-up covers the hitches as well as the triumphs. But as a model for engaging this sometimes-challenging audience,  I thought the project shone.